tant to me; we have so much traffic on our white floors that, even with daily re-
painting, we have to run an action on all our portraits with a true white back-
ground and floor to blur the scuff marks and lighten everything to white. As a
result, one light from above gives our production department sufficiently even
illumination to create a clean look.
If you don’t want to worry about applying an action, though, you can set up
two lights, fired into umbrellas, on each side of the white area or to each side
above the background. Lights illuminating the white background should be set
at the same reading as the main light; you don’t want that expanse of white to
become a reflector, bouncing light back toward the camera.
I personally don’t use any accent lights or hair lights in my high-key setups.Fill Light.
In my first books, I used nothing but reflected fill. Then, a few years later, we
went digital. With the first digital cameras, I didn’t like the look of the shad-
owing with reflector only, so I used a flashandreflected light for fill. Now, in
most of my photographs, I am back to reflected-fill only. As I mentioned above,
your lighting techniques should always be evolving.LIGHTING 41A low lighting ratio creates soft shadows
that provide gentle modeling of the face.